A Thousand Paths
by Exileian
Summary: Fifteen hundred years can last both an infinity and a split second. Now with 33 percent more historical inaccuracy.
1. China, Late 5th Century

_To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness. _

- Confucius

The boy was brought to the temple late in midday. He wasn't particularly special, with unruly black hair and rough clothes, looking around at the grounds wonderingly with wide eyes. From on top of the armory roof, two slightly older boys watched him as he was escorted by Master Bai into the main building of the complex.

"Kinda little, don't you think?" asked one, idly picking at the roof tiles.

"I wouldn't say that if I were you," said the other with a dry amusement.

"Hey, I'm bigger than that!" The first boy flicked a chunk of painted stone at the second with a scowl. "And he's skinny, too. All bones."

"He's probably from a peasant village."

"That doesn't mean much. So were you, and you were never that little."

"You weren't here when I arrived."

"So you were?"

"Well, no, but - "

Footsteps sounded on the ground below, and a senior monk glared up at the boys.

"Dashi! Guan! Get down from there! If you break the tiles and the armory floods again, I'll whip you both so badly you'll ache for a month!"

Startled and chastised, both boys leapt up and scrambled down to the roof's edge, leaping the seven or so feet to the ground and landing with practiced ease. They assembled in front of the monk, slightly subdued.

"Sorry, Master Yi," they said in unison, although neither sounded very sorry.

"I'm sure you are. How many tiles did you break, Dashi?"

"None, sir. I just picked a few chips out of them," said the first boy, already starting to slouch a bit.

"A few chips can turn into a whole tile in a matter of minutes. And you, Guan?"

"None. He was doing all the picking," said the second.

"Of course he was." The monk sighed and looked toward the sky, muttering quietly to himself. The boys fidgeted where they were, glancing toward the center building.

"Uh, Master Yi ... "

"Yes?" He glanced down and caught their glances. "Oh, yes. Come with me. There's a new prospective Dragon here today. I'm sure you saw him coming in."

A new Dragon! Dashi and Guan glanced at each other with faint, mischievous grins. There had been several arrivals to the temple in the years they'd been there, but all had been monks from other temples or particularly pious men coming for a term of isolation and thought. They were the only two Dragons-In-Training, young apprentices to the path of the Xiaolin Dragons, despite there being four paths to follow. The idea of another one being found was not only exciting spiritually, but also personally. It meant another friend for them.

As close as they were, they were somewhat lonely among the ancient and wizened sages that surrounded them daily.

They had to wait inside the temple for a while, breathing in the incense and being otherwise bored, while the boy was interviewed by the head monk. It was probably just as boring as their own had been. In retrospect, it was hardly a thing to think about, and they laughed about it even now, but they knew that the boy was probably just as frightened as they had been. It wasn't every day you got to meet someone as powerful as Master Monk Chen - especially not when he might have some kind of interest in you.

Slowly, the other monks gathered, ignoring the two boys who sat irreverently on the floor near the edge of the room. Whispers passed overhead, and though they pretended not to hear, neither Dashi nor Guan could fully stop themselves from listening to the rumors.

_I heard he was found in a village not far from Luoyang. _

_Master Bai first saw him wrestling a tiger cub. _

_The temple guards say he has pale eyes - almost the color of amber. _

Their excitement grew and made them restless. Neither spoke, but they shared glances. When was it going to be over? Was he that impressive, or was the head monk testing him harder, for some reason? Or was their memory just a little off from before - had it always taken this long?

_Master Bai had to pay his family quite a sum to get them to part with him, I heard. _

The door creaked open. The boys scrambled to their feet, partially hidden behind nearby large pillars. Out came Master Bai, one of their most traveled men; following him, the scrawny boy from before, looking wary and confused; and last, the honorable Master Monk Chen, his back bent with age but his walk steady. He stopped just beyond the doorway of his study and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder.

Guan saw the boy squirm slightly, as if the grip disturbed him.

"My fellow Xiaolin monks," called Master Monk Chen, his voice booming through the small room, "I have excellent news. Heaven has granted us a great boon."

The silence grew tense, and the monks all seemed to lean forward, watching the boy with powerful stares. He stared straight ahead, shaking only the tiniest bit.

"The honorable Master Bai has traversed the wide expanse of all China and returned with a great promise. He has found one of the lost powers out in the great dark world and brought it to us, to bring light and good to the world." The head monk's hand tightened on the boy's shoulder. "He has found this boy, who will from this day forth train among his companions to become one of the four Xiaolin Dragons - for he is the Xiaolin Dragon of the Wind!"

Praises and chants went up, thanking the Heavens and the ancestors and the gods, both local and universal. A few of the higher-ranked monks went up to speak to Master Bai, congratulating him on finding one of the Dragons. Dashi and Guan watched from their spots behind the pillars.

"He looks weird," Dashi decided.

"Uncomfortable."

"Same thing." He shifted and peered out further, fixing the boy with a scrutinizing eye. "But I'd probably feel the same way if everyone was staring at _me _like that."

Guan watched the boy as well, seeing the shifting, the way he looked around like he wanted to be free of the temple walls. He wondered if they should go up to greet him when someone grabbed him - and, as he noticed, Dashi too - by the back of the neck and hauled him off his feet.

"Hiding like little cowards, were you?" asked Master Yi, sounding irritated. "You could have been standing with the _other_ apprentices, you know. Like you _should _have been."

"Aw, come on, Master," said Dashi, squirming as the pair of them were dragged toward the exit. "We just wanted to see what was going to happen."

"You could see fine from the entryway steps!" He didn't let them go until they were halfway down the hall that lead outside. "You're barely apprentices, and yet you choose to go where you please and do what you want. I've told you time and again that you're under the same restrictions as any other apprentice, so why don't you listen to me?"

"We're sorry, Master Yi," said Guan as he stumbled ahead. "But he's going to be our new classmate, so we just couldn't help ourselves."

Master Yi sighed, stopping once they'd left the temple and were back on the grounds. He looked out at the complex, stone buildings bathed in the pale autumn sun.

"I know you're excited," he said eventually. "But he didn't come from the same families you two did. He's younger, and much further behind, than either of you. Master Bai will be teaching him away from you two until he's caught up. You're going to have to temper your enthusiasm. Don't look at me like that," he admonished, seeing the dejected expressions on the boys' faces. "It wasn't _my _choice to bring back a child from the middle of nowhere and claim he's the next Dragon of the Wind. You'll see him soon enough, anyway, even if you won't spend as much time with him as you'd like. He'll be in the same dormitory as you, after all."

Dashi and Guan nodded, still somewhat unhappy. Their chance for a new classmate and friend in their destinies was suddenly put on hold, and neither boy liked the thought.

Master Yi sighed again, rubbing his forehead.

"Fine, fine ... once he's settled in, why don't you two give him a tour of the grounds? His training starts tomorrow, in any case."

They glanced up, then at each other, smirks returning.

.-.-

The boy's name, as it turned out, was Chase Young.

They met him just outside the apprentices' dormitories, after he'd changed into the traditional red and white outfit. Up close, he was just as unruly, just as scrawny, and like the rumors said, had eyes so strangely pale as to look almost amber.

"Dashi, Guan," said Master Yi, "this is Chase Young. He will be your fellow apprentice as of today."

Guan bowed slightly, which Chase returned hesitantly. Dashi watched, then leaned in as close as he could to Chase. The boy leaned back, startled.

" ... what?" he asked, and Guan wasn't surprised to hear a slight coarseness in Chase's voice.

"Weird," said Dashi. "They're really gold. Why're your eyes that color?"

Chase's jaw fell open a bit, and his eyes narrowed.

"None of your business!" he hissed.

"Dashi!" snapped Master Yi, smacking him on the side of the head. "Don't be so rude, you idiot!"

"I was just asking!"

"It's merely part of who he is," said Master Bai. "A trait which made him stand out among his peers, along with many other talents." He rested a hand on the boy's shoulder to steady him.

"Honestly, Dashi. Have I taught you nothing about respect?"

"You've taught me plenty," Dashi said, and then muttered, "more than I care about."

"Well, then," said Master Yi as he yanked Dashi back by the ear (the comment had not gone unheard), "why don't you two boys show Chase around the temple grounds and teach him the rules? Afterward you can have dinner. You'll get a dispensation from training today - just for this, mind you. It's not going to happen again."

"Of course, Master Yi," said Guan, since Dashi was trying to pull himself free of the Master's iron grip. Chase, watching the struggle, grinned a bit.

Shortly, the three of them were passing through the grounds. Dashi did most of the talking, as he always did; pointing out this building or that, the gates and archways, the statues and carvings, the monks who passed them by. Chase took it all in, listening carefully, his eyes catching as many details as they could. Guan watched him in turn, adding in the _correct _information whenever Dashi mutilated it or left it out.

It took them two hours to make a full circuit of the temple grounds. As they came back to the apprentices' dormitories, another boy shouted to Dashi - an accusation of theft, as it always seemed to be. Dashi yelled back and ran to salvage his honor and prove that he was innocent, leaving Guan and Chase on the stone path. They were silent for a moment before Guan decided to re-introduce himself.

"We haven't really talked," he said. "My name's Guan. It's a pleasure to meet you." He bowed slightly again.

"Chase," the other boy responded, slightly startled. "And ... you too." He returned the bow after a moment of forgetfulness.

"This is ... pretty sudden, isn't it?" Guan recalled his own first days - his first week, actually. Hectic and panicked, afraid and unsure, he'd been the first of them to arrive and therefore the one with the least friendly help to show him the ropes. "Where are you from?"

"Near Luoyang," said Chase, looking around more rather than at Guan. "I've never been to the city itself."

"Then from a village?"

"Yes." The boy looked down at the ground. "It didn't really have a name."

They were quiet for a little while longer, but the silence quickly grew more awkward than Guan wanted to deal with. Fortunately, Dashi reappeared, dashing down the steps and landing between them.

"Sorry," he said. "He said I hid his slippers. Idiot put them under his bed and forgot about them. I could _see_ them!" He turned to Chase and grabbed the boy's sleeve. "Come on, I'll show you where dinner is. Since we're apprentices, we have to help serve everybody else before we can eat."

Dashi started off, dragging Chase behind him. Guan followed closely, listening to Dashi's complaints about their work and mentioning that Dashi rarely ever actually did the work he was assigned; it was shoved off onto other people. Now that Chase was here, it would mean even less desire to do his work. It probably wouldn't go over well, but that was his friend - it was probably never going to change, no matter how many times Master Yi yelled at him and kicked him into action.

Dinner was, as always, a relatively simple meal. Rather than go back to their dormitory and eat there like everyone else, Dashi and Guan brought Chase to their favorite place to eat - just outside the temple, a little glade of trees behind a hidden break in one of the walls. Dashi shoved the loosely-placed stone chunks out of the way and slipped through, sprawling on the grass almost immediately. Guan settled down nearby, and Chase awkwardly pushed his way through, sitting against the wall with one leg pulled under him.

"Do you always eat here?" he asked, looking up at the branches above.

"Not always," said Guan, as Dashi was too busy eating to answer politely. "Some days we eat in the dormitories, or with the other apprentices, or with the other monks - if we're instructed." He glanced sidelong at his friend. "Less these days than when I was here alone."

"If you'ff got a poblem wiff 'e 'ay I eaff," Dashi said, rice both halfway to and already filling his mouth, "'en you 'an eaff _a'one _from now on."

"I didn't even understand that."

"Yes you did!" Dashi said after he swallowed, his chopsticks between his teeth. "My manners aren't that bad!"

"They're terrible," Guan teased with a slight grin. "A demon couldn't be worse."

"That's heretical."

"It's true."

Chase snickered, nearly upsetting his tray. Dashi snorted and rolled onto his back, pulling the chopsticks out of his mouth and trying to catch dust motes out of the air.

"Jerks," he muttered.

"He had every right to laugh." Guan smiled at Chase, who looked back down at his food quickly. "Most of what you do warrants at least a little laughter. Isn't that the point?"

"Yeah, but not when you say it like that." Dashi rolled over and looked at Chase carefully. "So what's your family like?"

"My family?" Chase set down his chopsticks and glanced at Dashi.

"You know. Siblings, parents, grandparents, positions, titles. Anything, really."

Dashi may not have seen it right away, but Guan did. The second Dashi said _positions_, Chase's expression darkened.

" ... I've got two brothers and two sisters," he said, his voice quieter than before. "Both my parents, and all their parents. That's it."

"What, no titles? What do your parents do?" Dashi asked even as Guan tried to stop the questions.

"No. No titles." The look in those oddly pale eyes kept any further questions at bay. "We're farmers. That's all we do, every day, every week, every year. We farm."

The boy looked back through the hole in the wall, at the temple grounds beyond, at the darkening fringes of the horizon just above the distant walls.

"That's why ... I don't know why I'm here. I don't know if I belong here, or if this is just some mistake."

They were all quiet then. Guan wasn't sure what to say - if he should even say anything at all, offering words of comfort and compassion, or if he should simply let the silence ease the despair that stained those last words. Dashi, on the other hand, propped himself up on his elbows and gave Chase a scrutinizing look.

"Master Bai's never made a mistake in his life, y'know." He smirked a little as Chase looked back at him. "He's famous for traveling everywhere in China and bringing back all sorts of wisdom and information. One of these days, he's going to make a trip to the southwest - all the way to India. There's no way he could ever be wrong." Chase opened his mouth to say something, but Dashi continued without giving him a chance. "I don't really care where you came from or what you think you do or don't deserve. The fact is that you're here, in this temple, right now, and you're a Xiaolin Apprentice. A Xiaolin _Dragon _Apprentice."

Dashi smirked and held up his chopsticks, clicking them together a few times.

"Your destiny's taken a whole new turn. Think about that, and focus on the future you've got ahead of you."

Chase stared, then returned the smirk with a smile of his own, looking back down at his tray.

Guan smiled, too, down at his irreverent and flighty friend, who, for all his faults, still knew where the right words were lying in wait. He just always wanted to save them for the best possible moment.


	2. Palestine, 1187

The sun seared across the sand dunes, raising heat mirages in the distance. From under a rocky outcropping, Chase watched the distant city with narrowed eyes. The shadows were a poor substitute for an adequate temperature, but they would do. It wasn't as if he was venturing out into the blazing heat himself.

The city was shrouded in a haze of smoke. Walls stood proudly despite giant chunks missing from them. Siege weapons, partially dismantled, were nearly invisible in the heat mirages. From the battered fringes came a steady, slow-moving dark stream that shifted and wavered. He squinted, but even his excellent eyes couldn't make out anything defining. He had his guesses, though.

Jerusalem had fallen, and now its people fled.

Though he supposed that both 'fallen' and 'fled' were a little misleading. The city had not so much fallen as been surrendered, or so the crows and ravens told him; perched on the broken towers and among the masses of corpses, they heard and saw whatever they liked. Carrion birds were commonplace, unnoticed. Nobody would have suspected them as spies, which was precisely the reason he used them. In any case, the surrender had gone with relative smoothness, a genuine surprise to Chase. Man and war went hand in hand; peace was merely a short period between battles. Certainly there would be more war to look forward to in a very short while, once the news of the city's 'fall' got back to the right people.

Even more surprising was the fact that people were being allowed to leave. There was no invasion, no wholesale slaughter, just people filing out in columns, if his eyes told him right. There was no rush to escape. Nobody was being chased by a contingent of armed men on horseback. It was remarkably calm, but then again, calm could be deceptive.

A black speck ascended abruptly from the piles of corpses that littered the ground. It flew awkwardly for a while until it caught an updraft and soared over the speckled dunes and people toward the deep-shadowed spot where Chase lurked. When it landed, it all but crashed into him, just barely alighting on his hand without toppling off. There was still a shred of flesh clamped in its beak.

It offered the shred to him, head tilted to the side. He eyed it with no little disdain.

"You keep it." The bird fluttered, bobbed its head, snapped its beak and swallowed, meeting Chase's eyes the whole time.

Thousands of men had come to this battlefield; thousands more had died to get there, or once they laid eyes on it. It was never hard to track a war's progress when you held the scavengers of the dead in your employ, even in a windswept, hellish landscape like this one. He had traveled between dawn and noon every day, making slow but steady progress, knowing that he could have simply spoken the right words and caught up to the traveling armies in a moment - or beat them to their destinations. But a hundred thousand men did not move swiftly, and his birds watched the progress for him, whenever he was left behind.

He stared into the depthless black eyes of the crow and _reached_, feeling the spark of magic that came from only the blackened pits of the Heylin snapping between his mind and its memory. Each time they returned to him, he sought out the world through their eyes: soaring high, diving low, hidden in plain sight and utterly ignored by the soldiers and civilians who saw their ilk every day. In their eyes he saw that simple thing that caused so many problems for the world: life.

And now …

_The world in the eyes of a bird was not the world in the eyes of a creature gifted by the Heylin touch, but it was close. The silver streams of wind and shadow were starker, more rigidly defined, and the color red stood out in a hue that even he had no word for; the smell of red, maybe, or the taste of it. In any case it was there, and it was the only anomaly in the world of a Heylin bird, and what the bird didn't understand, he did._

_Among the high updrafts of the heat and sky the world was wide and endless, horizons slipping seamlessly from one infinity into another. First there was the pure freedom of flight, then the terrific vertigo of a snap of wings and the plunge down, down, down toward the last home of all that lived, and then the leveling, catching drafts again, wings flapping, driving hollow bones and rigid feathers onward to an uncertain goal._

_The clatter of feet on stone. The rustle of wings settling in accordance with gravity. The world of humans, so busy compared to the simple freedoms of the sky, rushing on around and by._

_A stream of men and women and children, trudging silently, clutching their possessions with a grim determination, passes by. There is no red here, except in flashes or bound under clothing, and there is no reason to stay except for a dark instruction rendered irresistible in the bird's simple mind. When the horses come rushing by it flees to higher ground, but never stops watching - not simply because it knows it should, but for the promise of a meal when something, eventually, stops moving._

_The horses stop in a frantic mess, several pulling alongside the fallen stone of a former outpost. Red gleams on their riders' surcoats and tabards, on their weapons and arms. Silence never falls but less sound inches ahead as the horses fall to whatever calm they can with their rolling eyes and heat fever. A man falls from one's back; another, helmeted, leaps to his aid. A third man stays atop his horse and watches._

_There are words. There is anger. From this distance it all seems unclear, voices lost among each other. A short descent and then there is clarity, and while no bird can be told to listen, it hears even as it watches._

_"There is nothing you can do, Guillaume. No Hospitaller would see him, even if there were enough left alive for it." The man on horseback speaks with a voice weary and defeated, his tabard long since torn to nearly bisect the blazing sigil of his order._

_"He breathes and he bleeds, that's enough to say he still lives!" The man kneeling is stripping off the fallen man's armor to reveal haphazard bandages beneath, stained with that dark and eerie sense of smell and taste. The fallen man says nothing; he only groans, weakly, as the sun beats down on his weathered face._

_"And for how much longer?" A horse paws the ground, eager to move, to get out of the sun. "Even if you do save him from death, what sort of life awaits him afterward? Injured, defeated men cannot be soldiers and cannot survive."_

_The kneeling man rises up, tearing his helmet from his head and turning to look at the man still mounted and utterly unmoved. His expression is unreadable, save for the desperate fury that struggles to hold up the agony of a soul defeated._

_"Then you would let him die?" he demands of what has to be his superior, in a tone that screams punishment for insubordination - but the mounted man only sighs, wiping sweat from his exposed neck._

_"I would put him out of his misery, bury him, pray for him, and leave him. As we have done before, as we will do again a hundred times before we see France again." His horse jerks its head, but does not move. "Though we may not have time to bury him, nor the inclination in this unholy heat."_

_"We can't leave him. I can't! It was my life he saved - "_

_"And he did so because it was his duty," the mounted man interrupts, cutting off the desperation with something akin to frustration, though not so negative. "You would have done the same in his place, of that, I have no doubt - but that did not happen. Dragging him home a cripple would not repay him for his actions."_

_The man grips his helmet hard in bloody fingers, his teeth clenched tight together as he tries to find the words that he knows are somewhere out there, avoiding him. The man on the ground struggles to keep his breath in his lungs. The bird comes closer, eyes fixed on the mess seeping into the ground._

_"Leave him, Guillaume. Let those who knew him think he died defending his people and his faith from those marauders. It's the best way a man can be remembered in this war."_

_The almost-silence pervades again. The man holding his helmet lowers his head, defeated. The mounted man brings his horse closer and claps him on the shoulder, saying something too low and quiet for a bird to hear, and in any case the bird is fixated on the stilling body of the man on the ground. It waits and focuses on him even as the horses pick up their furious trails and start trampling back along the pilgrims' path, leaving behind only two, discounting the dying man._

_The one holding his helmet looks up and sees the bird. He yells and hurls his helmet with all his strength at it, nearly smashing it into a pulp; the unsettling sensation of height strikes as it lunges into the air awkwardly, all ruffled feathers and confused resentment at being denied a meal, even when there are a thousand more like it waiting to be found._

Chase broke off the memory and shook his head, trying to clear the spirals of black and silver from his eyes. The crow hopped from his hand to his shoulder as he pressed his fingers to his eyes. Even after six hundred years, he still wasn't completely used to that; he doubted he ever would be. There was just something fundamentally unnatural about seeing the world through another's mind.

Not that he could speak much on what was natural.

The sun continued to beat down on the land. He pressed his back harder against the rocky wall behind him, knowing that sooner or later, the sun was going to slip in and he'd be victim to the unstoppable heat, dry as it was. Certainly it wouldn't be _that_ bad; it wasn't a frozen northern wasteland, bound and determined to drag him to a halt, but extremes in either direction slowed his blood and made him lethargic. Here, in the shade, he was at his prime. Unfortunately the shade didn't extend much further outside this little outcropping.

With a grimace, Chase stepped out into the sunlight, one hand shadowing his eyes. With hardly more than a thought he could soar over to the city's gates and explore it for himself, but in broad daylight that would be a bad idea in the very deepest sense of the phrase. Instead, he shrugged his shoulder and set the crow back to its scavenging, pulling a hood over his head to block out the direct sunlight.

Then, gloved fingers gripping to the stone face of the outcropping, he made his way down to the flatter ground, toward the people and the horses and the flood of life expelled from a city that seethed like embers.

.-.-

The moon hung in the sky like the blade of a scythe, thin and curved and slightly pocked with use. It gleamed white with ancient light and cast a strange, eerie hue across the rocks and dunes. Pinpoints of flame hung like stars in the sea of sand and brush, scattered here and there along the pilgrims' route to the surrounding cities and harbors that would take them back to their native lands. Some were ramshackle tents and half-built huts that held Jerusalem's former occupants; others were military camps that held defeated soldiers, warriors of their God that sought redemption for their failure.

In one, a commander sat down with his men and shared a meal with them; in another, a captain killed a captured deserter and cut the throat of another who'd helped him. Elsewhere, a young woman crouched by a fireside, too tired to do anything but watch the flames and listen to the snores of the men who pulled her from the rubble.

Set further back from the path, almost lost among the hills and stone, seven men rested, either asleep or doing the menial tasks that made up the greater portion of their lives. A few cleaned the blood off their armor; one sharpened his blade with grim determination; another stared moodily into the fire, not eating the last of the meager rations he had in his hand. All were silent. None had heard the sound of softened claws on rock, of sand shifting in little waterfalls to the ground.

Chase stood at the edge of the camp and waited.

Guillaume d'Amiens was of the Knights Templar; tall, strong, and devoted, he had come to the land to purge it of the infidels and keep the people safe in the name of God. Chase had watched him, as he watched so many of the warriors, seeing strength and skill and all manner of survival instinct. But Chase also watched for things that were more difficult to see - the very same things that had been seen in him, so long ago.

He sought pride, which came in droves; not the pride of a man who sees his skill and revels in it, but pride hidden, tucked away, marveled at like a hidden stash of gems or gold.

He sought arrogance, which came equally in droves; not the arrogance which every man here had, which had faded with their loss in the war from a dazzling gold to mere rusted bronze, but arrogance linked directly to guilt and shame but that was nonetheless fanned hot and bright by the seething fires of anger and disdain.

He sought doubt; and here, _here_ was the key to finding the right embittered soul, because while doubt ran rife among the men who served in even the holiest of ranks, he could always find the ones he wanted by watching and listening.

He didn't care for those who doubted their faith or their place in the world. What he waited for were the ones who doubted _everything_, who questioned when told not to, who stared out across the barren land and empty sky and endless, _endless_ battles and thought _is this all I'm meant to have?_

Guillaume had come to the Holy Land seven years prior, with no relatives left behind in France and only a dying lord to instruct him to a better future. Now, all he had were those he had served alongside; the Templar were known for their deep bonds of brotherhood. To lose them was to lose your family. The dead man from earlier in the day had been one of his closest friends.

The city had fallen, surrendered after a siege. Morale was at an all-time low, one that would only sink further as the days passed and the people in France or England or Spain demanded better reasons for such failure than merely sparing the lives of thousands of innocent people. (Ah, the nobility.) They were all worn down, Guillaume perhaps most of all; he had dealt with too much, and despite all his strength, his soul was starting to waver.

Chase often had to work people down to this level before they were worth challenging. The war had certainly been a blessing for his army - as it usually was.

There in the darkness he waited until Guillaume finally put away the stained and ragged cloth that he had been trying in vain to use to wipe away a long-suffering splash of dried blood from his armor. (It had gotten into the nicks and scratches, the gouges and the scrapes, and by now it had practically ingrained itself into the metal. It would never come out. That was fine enough, though; the plate mail would soon be sold, melted down and reforged into something new. Even Templar Knights could not expect a constant supply of such fine armor, not when they had failed so - ) But, with cloth and metal set aside, the man walked past his fellows beyond the camp, to the last circle of the firelight, out of earshot and nearly out of sight.

Within Chase's deadly range.

For a few long minutes, Guillaume stared out at the spot where the land met the sky, a horizon over a hill. The stars shone bright despite the moon's eerie glow. For a time, there was only silence; no cries of battle or fury, no insects with their nightly songs. The wind picked up on the fringe of hearing and carried the snapping of the fire back around. Everything stayed that way until the Templar sighed and turned with a scrape of sand.

"A pity what happened," Chase said, a smile on his face and in his voice.

Guillaume whirled, his eyes and countenance dark and ready to defend. His hand rested on the pommel of his sword as a threat to anyone who saw it, but Chase had faced far worse and fought back a laugh.

"Who's out there?" More accustomed to the dark than a mortal's, Chase's eyes could see the twist of wary anger on Guillaume's face. It wouldn't take much for him to lunge into the dark with his sword drawn at this point: a wrong word or a silhouetted movement too unfamiliar to place, and he would be fighting for his life. Chase stayed perfectly still by the rocks.

"All your efforts, destroyed in one single diplomatic swing," he practically chided, as if the decision had been on Guillaume's shoulders alone. "I would hardly stand for it - but then again, this isn't my war. How _angry_ you must be, thinking of all the sacrifices you made that have gone to waste … "

"Enough." Guillaume's voice cut through the darkness like the blade he was threatening to draw. "Tell me who you are and what you want, or leave."

"Interesting questions." He tilted his head very slightly and smiled wider when Guillaume didn't move. "And if I refuse all your options?"

"Then stand in the light and fight me." The thinnest sliver of worn metal showed itself above the sword's sheathe, and Guillaume stared defiantly into the darkness. "Unless you are a coward, satisfied to insult me and nothing more."

The challenge hung in the air like a noose, though for whose neck was still unclear. Chase narrowed his eyes at the silhouetted figure, judging, evaluating, considering. _Who are you to call me a coward, you insignificant human?_ For a moment he could see his victory in the bloodless sand, a figure lying still beneath his clawlike fingertips.

Then he laughed, drawing attention to where he stood, and it was only because of wariness that the Templar didn't charge at him seeking blood.

"My, how threatening," he said with a smirk, and he could see the anger tighten Guillaume's shoulders. No longer afraid of being found, Chase idly adjusted his bracers and leaned against the nearby rocks. "Most men would tell me to _begone, foul monster, unless it is death you seek_. Yet you ask me to fight." He saw the shift as the Templar prepared a comeback and cut him off. "I'm pleased to know that somewhere in this world, a sense of honor remains."

"Then you mean to fight?"

"Certainly, but I'm afraid the light doesn't agree with me." The distant firelight couldn't quite reach his teeth, sharp and showing against the icy night air. "Step into the dark; you'll see me just as well."

The silence after his words stretched on a little too long. Guillaume peered into the dark, his expression unreadable, before turning sharply and moving swiftly back into the camp. Chase, surprised, stood in the darkness and wondered: _don't tell me I misjudged you, Templar. I never misjudge_. When the man did not return shortly and the seconds dragged into minutes, he scowled into the night and hunched a little against the cold. Would he have to tempt him further? Spend days tormenting him with nightmares, hallucinations in the blistering heat, lure him with the promise of power if only he would just -

But then he did return, carrying with him a hastily-made torch. Guillaume brought the light into the darkness, swinging it around to illuminate the shadows and eventually reveal Chase where he stood.

Smirking, now.

Guillaume's countenance was as dark as his eyes, shadowed in the wavering torchlight. He glanced over Chase once to check him for threats and weapons and saw only the single, simple sword belted by his side - but from the way his eyes only hardened at the sight, it was clear that he would not be underestimating his opponent.

Chase stepped forward. Guillaume stuck the torch's unburning end into the ground and drew his own sword. His eyes followed Chase's every leisurely movement as he drew a line or two in the sand with his toe and toyed with the pommel of his sword, but there were no words exchanged, only the sound of the snapping flames. A clever man, and a dangerous one, to bring his terms into another's world. But of course Chase would hardly hunt down someone who complied so easily. Obedience could be taught later, after all.

He drew his sword a little slowly and was nearly caught off-guard when Guillaume charged him, slashing downward with all the strength he had. So there would be no hesitation here, would there? So long as he was armed, he was fair game? Guillaume must have been weary and frustrated after so long. This was a little swift, even for Chase.

But what was he if not a master of this sort of thing?

He caught the blow before it tore him shoulder to hip, blocking it with his free hand on the dull edge of the blade. This close, Guillaume's dark hair fell into his eyes, shadowed unevenly by the flickering of the nearby fire; he looked for all the world like a man ready to kill if it meant a good night's sleep. Chase fought back a wide, toothy grin and dug his heels into the ground, slipping back with the sand and finding a firmer grip on the rocks. He shoved back and forced Guillaume off him for just long enough to lunge forward and put the Templar on the defense.

The fighting was fast and brutal; there was no pretense of power here, only one man desperate to be left to his misery and another insistent on twisting that pain to his advantage. There was no showing off. War took the glory out of fighting, especially when you had lost. Now the violence was no more than a means to an end, and Chase was perfectly happy to submit to that definition for the moment. To see a man truly, you watched how he fought in his most desperate hour … and while this wasn't precisely a _desperate_ hour, there was a desperation here that sufficed well enough. Guillaume fought with nothing more to lose than his life, and still he demanded a victory.

_How unfortunate for you that I never lose_, Chase thought.

"Do you think his death was pointless?" he asked, ducking a swipe and matching it with one of his own. Guillaume's face twitched out of its battle-focus briefly, a flicker of confusion wiped away in an instant.

"What are you talking about?"

"Your friend." Chase seized the hilt of Guillaume's blade, just below the Templar's own hand. "The one who died to save_ you._"

The man blanched, but recovered fast and kicked out, forcing Chase back.

"Don't speak of him as if you knew him."

"I didn't." He flexed his fingers to resettle his grip, claws scraping against the leather bindings through the gloves. They circled each other warily, keeping within the boundaries of the torchlight. "All I know is that he's dead because you were in the wrong place at just the wrong time. Quite the burden to carry, isn't it." A flash of white teeth showed as he grinned, all malice and cruelty. "How will you ever get forgiveness for _that?_"

Guillaume gave a cry of rage and lunged, trying to silence Chase permanently, but he dodged out of the way and ducked the oncoming blows.

"His death was not my fault! I would have done the same for him!"

"But it wasn't him, it was _you._ Who can be blamed but you for this?"

"The Saracens!" snapped the Templar, and Chase only grinned wider to hear the waver of uncertainty in his voice. He pulled back to stand between Guillaume and the camp, sword lowered just enough to be perceived as a potential threat and nothing more.

"Of course," he said, his voice suddenly so much less vicious. "If it hadn't been for their assault, you would both still be alive, no doubt patrolling the edge of Jerusalem together. But … " He tapped three fingers on his sword's hilt. "Have you wondered why they attacked in the first place?"

"To reclaim the city in the name of their god," the Templar spat, "and to try and bring to a halt the word of the Lord."

"Wouldn't it have been so much easier to do that by killing every Christian they found, rather than letting you all ride free?"

The silence hung again, and Guillaume narrowed his eyes at Chase's silhouetted form. Then he shook his head and readied his blade again.

"I will not have a discussion with someone who insults me and slanders a good man, dead though he may be."

"I've slandered no one and insulted no one."

"You blamed me for his death!"

"Did I?" Chase asked sharply, as if daring Guillaume to give him perfect evidence of such a crime. "I only stated the facts. If you hadn't been so close to the tower, the rubble never would have reached you."

_Or so said the eyes of his birds, flying high above the carnage, watching with memories twisted to hold images forever - or until he saw no further use for them. A splattered sea of red and black, whites and grays, vivid in a carrion-eater's mind like the sparkle of a fallen gem by the side of a river on a cloudy and uneventful day._

Guillaume stared at him, sword momentarily loose in his hands, and Chase's mind flashed the image of himself knocking the blade away and hurling the Templar to the ground, demanding his loyalty and obeisance, forcing his body to twist from natural to unnatural and back again. He saw his own teeth sunk deep into the red of a human throat - but then it was gone, and Guillaume's face was warier than it had been before.

"How do you know that?" he asked, every word a little more guarded, and as Chase smiled like the last thing a drowning man sees, there were shouts behind them.

The other Templar had finally grown weary of waiting to find out what their brother was doing, and, drawn by the sound of fighting, could now see an unfamiliar figure, armed and with its back to them.

He fixed Guillaume with his grin and hurled himself back into the darkness, sword in its sheathe, feet finding purchase where there shouldn't have been any and claws digging hard into sand and stone. Fifty feet from the camp he doubled back, creeping up along the rocky ledges like a shadow to watch the camp again, to hear Guillaume try to explain his fight and the strange figure who had spoken to him. They blamed it on spies and Saracens and headed back to the firepit.

He couldn't explain the cut on his side, though. Chase left shortly after that, pulling his blade out again and flicking the thin trail of blood onto the sand, his eyes gleaming victory in the dark.

.-.-

The port city of Acre was busy, as it always was, but now it was even more frantic than before. The news of Jerusalem's fall had spread far and wide, carried on the saddles of the fastest horses. Refugees were streaming to the safer cities and ports in the hopes of escaping to new, safer homes, or back to their countries of origin. Caravans fled north regularly. Ships came and went bearing letters, warnings - and armed men.

The few fighting men who had survived the battle and gotten away ransomed made for their castles in the outskirts or the cities that would inevitably need defending. A small contingent, Guillaume among them, came to Acre and made silently for the docks. Their intent was to stay long enough to ensure the city's safety, then set sail for home having regained a fragment of honor. Chase arrived in the city the day before they did and kept a close eye on the one particular man who held his interest.

No holds barred, no hesitation. Only swift, brutal intent, and the skill to support it. He watched the white standard with its red cross flutter raggedly in the ocean wind from where he sat atop a wall tower, musing on the possibilities of finding another soldier among the victorious just to see who was the better fighter. Would hate win out over the adrenaline of triumph even while battered low? It was a tempting idea. But there were problems with the overall plan, and besides, there were thousands upon thousands among Saladin's army. Those he had made note of were surely heading to other, more defended cities, riding on the winds of success.

Besides, adversity was where true warriors shone. Refusing to crack under pressure was the mark of the sort of man he wanted under his control.

A seagull perched nearby, webbed feet holding firmly to the time-weathered stone of the tower. It fixed Chase with one beady black eye to evaluate him for edibility. The wind ruffled its feathers, and he stared back at it, matching it unblinking stare for unblinking stare until it turned and trotted away to look for food less likely to hurl it over the parapet. Scavenger though it was, Chase had no desire to use a seagull to see the world. Sea birds in general held no appeal for him. They were hardly threatening, even when they did swarm. The filth of the world showed up on gray-white feathers more easily than black ones; crows and ravens were only rumored to be diseased. Anything white made it blatantly obvious.

_The purest souls are the most easily tarnished,_ he thought wryly.

There was a storm on the horizon, faint and hazy now but threatening to loom over the path of any ships intending to reach or leave Acre within a day. It would last some time, moving north and effectively ruining a number of shipping lines as their goods were sunk to the seafloor. It gave him a little extra time to do what he was here for, but with the armies on the move, he would have to make it fast. Staying in a city under siege was never a good idea.

In the grayish sunlight, among the grayish stones, Chase carefully made his way through the crowded streets toward the portside market. There were several, actually, spread along the last rises of stone before the docks began, but given the way they were laid out, they may as well have been one single long bazaar. Here was where the daily catch made its rounds, where the blacksmiths and tanners came in the early morning to share what they'd bought or traded off the incoming ships or made with what they'd bought. He kept his hood drawn up and breathed sharply through his teeth to try and keep out the stink of a thousand dying fish, but it permeated everything. Soon enough he gave up and forgot it was there.

The tradesmen hawked their wares. Nearby, the sound of a blacksmith hammering away at something on his anvil broke through the chatter of the crowd and the screaming seagulls to draw his attention. He saw a shield being crafted, rounded carefully with hammer blows and white-hot heat, and he made his way over there to watch from an inconspicuous corner. The man continued his work without ever looking up, and his apprentices were too busy to care about a figure in a rough brown robe watching them.

But he only watched them for long enough to see the ragged red-and-white tunic approach, ripped in places to reveal the battered mail beneath. Chase slipped closer to one of the stands displaying some of the blacksmith's better wares, watched by one apprentice whose fingers were forever busy putting together the tiny iron rings of chain mail. There he stood, inspecting the hilt of a sword, until the Templar cross was within his reach.

In the daylight, Guillaume looked wearier than before. The trek to Acre had not done much for him, and neither had the promise of weeks at sea. He picked up a sword and looked it overly aimlessly; Chase waited for him to set it down before speaking, close enough to be heard but also close enough to be attacked.

"How fortunate for you to be here ahead of the enemy," he said lightly, conversationally, as if they had never fought in the darkness of the desert. Guillaume's head whipped up and the man looked around sharply, unable to place that unusually familiar voice - yet. "How long does the city have, I wonder?"

With his head bowed and the hood pulled low, Chase's face was invisible to anyone nearby. He knew the Templar looked him over at least twice, but with such short sentences he couldn't find who he was looking for. His attention turned back to the swords - but that would never do.

"I trust your wound is not infected."

Now Guillaume looked up at the hood, his expression nearly unreadable, and Chase glanced up to match him stare for stare. His, however, was casual and light; he smirked, hiding a mouthful of deadly teeth because here and now was not the time for visible threats.

"You," Guillaume breathed, as if seeing a waking dream. "You _are_ real."

"Did you think I was a ghost?" Chase went back to examining the weaponry as if he taunted men of unparalleled skill every day. "Some witch's magic sent to plague you?"

"Or a devil."

Chase laughed, short and sharp.

"I've been called that before." He plucked a dagger from its spot and admired the clean edge of the blade. "Devil, demon, monster, warlock - and a number of words I doubt you'd even know."

It hadn't been meant as an insult to Guillaume's intelligence - rather to the fact that he knew French, perhaps a smattering of other European languages and a word or two in Arabic, not the countless languages under Chase's command - but the man took it that way nonetheless. With a hard scowl, he turned as if to move away in refusal to rise to mistaken bait.

"Begone. We have no business."

"Oh, but we do." Chase replaced the dagger and followed the Templar. "Our fight was interrupted, and I am loathe to let something like that go to waste."

"Neither of us won. Leave it at that."

"I refuse."

Guillaume looked up to see Chase watching him with a slightly raised eyebrow and a vaguely curious, as well as only _just_ threatening, expression. He looked ready to snort with derision over _Chase_ being the one to refuse when he started slightly, leaning in for half a second before drawing back in startled horror.

_Ah_, Chase thought, repressing a grin, _so now you notice_.

"Demon," hissed the Templar, glancing to either side of him in case anyone caught him consorting with a monster. "You have the Devil's own eyes!"

"I can assure you that they're mine, and always have been." It was his eyes more than his demeanor that got him reviled in Europe, he'd noticed; the standard slit pupil made the people there default to snakes rather than the appropriate dragon, and with snakes came reminisces of a paradise lost. Tempter, fiend, hell-bound monstrosity - oh, if only they _knew_, they'd save those judgments for after he shed his skin. "But I'm not the one in question here. Did you enjoy our fight?"

Guillaume seemed reticent to answer, still staring at the poison-gold of Chase's eyes. Chase saw the man clench his jaw and tighten his hand over the hilt of his blade. Warrior thoughts clashed with wavering religious fanaticism. Chase, though as patient as an immortal ever was, pushed onward, aware of the fact that religion could drive a man away from even that which he needed to live (much less a potential death), particularly when it came to a religion so heavily steeped in guilt.

"You came to this land to fight, did you not?" He looked over the weapons again, reaching out to feel the bite of halberd's blade. "To defend it and earn your rightful place. Yet now you have no choice but to return home to a land without promise, where corruption runs rampant and winter kills as many as any skirmish ever could."

It was a _bit_ of an elaboration, yes, but to an exhausted man it called up bitter memories and made the undesirable prospect of returning home even less appealing. Wars could be fought with nothing more than words if you knew how.

"You proved yourself time and again and your reward was failure. You are not a knight; you have no lands and nothing for you here, and the only difference between this place and your despised France is that here holds better memories. Am I wrong?"

Guillaume's mouth twisted, in anger or fear or thought, but he said nothing.

"Now you wonder how much longer this world is meant to last. You doubt yourself, and you doubt your God." He ignored the Templar's sharp jerk at that accusation. "You doubt everything and wonder if maybe you shouldn't simply vanish into that endless expanse of desert to atone for what will doubtless be seen as countless unforgivable sins."

"What do you want?" Guillaume demanded suddenly, cutting Chase off before he could continue.

He met Guillaume's eyes again, smirking in the city's grayish light .

"What if I could promise you an eternity to fight?"

The sound of the crowd around them remained nothing more than the endless, clattering noise of humans living their lives. Accustomed to ignoring it, Chase remained focused on Guillaume, who was staring at him in a mixture of anger and apprehension - and, of course, a fragment of fear, because his existence was meant for little else.

"An eternity?" Guillaume echoed, then tried to pull himself together. "You _are_ the Devil, sent to tempt me from the righteous path."

Chase was vaguely impressed with the conviction in the Templar's voice. It took some effort to stay that controlled when he came after someone, and again he was assured that this man was far more than an adequate choice to join his ranks. But he hadn't lived this long and learned nothing about humans, and he could hear the hesitation lingering at the back of those words.

"I suppose it could be seen that way," he agreed, breaking the matched stare to test the weight of a sword. "An eternity to fight - in Hell, suffering through your losses forever. Is that what you thought?" One wry glance back at Guillaume's surprise confirmed his theory. "As tempting as that sort of thing is, I would reserve punishments like that for people I _hate_, not warriors with ability far beyond that of common men."

A play to the ego. Some days, it bothered him how he went about this; it reminded him too much of his own life, of days spent agonizing over a decision that would warp him beyond anyone's wildest nightmares. But to flatter and assuage was a surefire way into nearly anyone's good graces, especially warriors who desired far more than they ever received.

_Yes, I know how well you fight. I have seen you and admired your skills. You say you serve only among the infantry? How unfortunate …_ I _would give you far more than that_.

Generals, of course, did the same sort of thing, but it had been some time since he had bothered to actually join any ranks. In his experience, more often than not, the highest to rank missed the most highly skilled simply by virtue of never having to actually interact with them. It made it so easy to take what he wanted.

_Finding_ that, however, was another matter entirely …

"Nonetheless, I am not your Devil, and I have no desire to make you suffer so greatly. I am from the East, far beyond these lands, where the devils can be defeated rather than merely feared." Chase set down the sword in his hand and reached for another. "Have you received your fill of war here, Guillaume? Or do you wish to wait another few years, to see if you can retake the city you lost?" Chase smiled, and Guillaume rankled. "I'm sure the armies of all Christendom will come to assist."

(And later, in the coming years, they would. They would retake some of their fallen cities; they would assault Jerusalem; they would seek to hold the Holy Land for the rest of time. But they would fail. They would never claim it for their own again.)

"I will serve as I am commanded."

"Such dedication. And if you are commanded to die?"

"Then I would die." Again the hesitation, so short and nearly invisible against the nigh-unflinching dedication to his cause. Chase's smirk thinned into condescension. Were it not for those few instants of silence, he wondered if he would be looking to simply kill, rather than convince.

"I doubt that." He put the sword back where it belonged and met Guillaume's eyes again. "You would not walk blindly to your death, sheeplike and unresisting. You would ask why. If they sent you against the city alone, or among only a few, you would demand a reason why. That alone is why you are still alive, and why, perhaps, you are not a knight."

Had it been untrue, there would have been a denial, or an argument. But no man would try to claim they would go proudly to a pointless death, much less one who wanted it less than anything in the world. Chase watched the words smother in Guillaume's throat and saw the creeping uncertainty in his eyes.

"If you go back to France, you may not be reviled, but you will certainly be called back here again. Among your order, there is not a knight alive who would not gather up his men and rush to a port to gain fame. So you will spend a short time in a land you despise only to return here to fight the victorious armies of a brilliant warlord, thrown again and again into the lion's den, and sooner or later, you _will not_ come back out. I have seen it happen time and again. Your death, pointless as it is, is assured."

There were no sudden sounds to jerk Guillaume out of his reverie, no sudden arrival to pull him away and give him time to rethink what he'd been told. The future played out in red and black before him, the sands stained a hideous amber by the eyes he couldn't look away from.

"That would be a waste of your strength and your talent. As would any form of death. You will go unknown into the darkness, with no-one left to mourn you except other men with similarly bleak fates."

Guillaume was shaken. He stared at the brittle edge of a blade, his mouth forming words that died before they reached his lips. Finally he spoke, eyes never straying from the iron.

"And … you would refute this? How?"

Chase smiled.

"South of here, at sunset. On the cliffs. I'll be waiting."

.-.-

By the time Guillaume arrived, Chase had been watching the sun sink toward the horizon for some time. He had discarded the hooded robe and underneath wore no armor save the leather bracers on his wrists. His sword was still at his side, as deadly as it had ever been, of a make that would be unfamiliar the world over except to a very few people in the furthest reaches of China.

He smiled as he heard the rough footsteps approach. These were good cliffs, strong and reluctant to break, and at their base were countless jagged rocks thrusting out of the ocean to smash anything that was so foolish or unlucky as to greet them. It was an excellent place to fight, and tactically, it was a godsend. Nobody could scale these safely unless their fingers were tipped in claws.

Challenges did so appeal to him.

"I'm pleased you decided to come." Chase didn't turn to speak to Guillaume, knowing without seeing that the Templar would be glaring at him, unsure of himself and wary of the lack of armor. "I trust you told no-one."

"None that would follow. Speak, and speak quickly." The anger and doubt had returned to Guillaume now that he'd had hours to think over Chase's words, and it was only an unstoppable curiosity that had drawn him to this place in the end - or so he would claim if asked, Chase was sure. But that was how it always went.

"As you wish. I said I could promise you an eternity of fighting, and that I will - on one condition. You and I will fight here, in single combat. If you are victorious, I will leave you be, and you will never see or hear from me again for the rest of your life." He nudged a rock over the edge of the cliff and watched it plunge into the white waters below.

"And if not?"

"If not, you kneel and pledge your eternal loyalty to me. You will serve me until I see fit to release you and offer no complaint no matter how long it is I choose to hold power over you."

"I would be your slave," Guillaume said darkly.

"In a sense." Chase laughed. "I would use a different word, but it works well enough."

"Those are hardly fair conditions."

"I am an unfair man. However, I give you my word as a warrior that _if_ you win, you will truly never see me again. Your future will be yours to do with what you will."

He heard a low mutter in French and imagined that Guillaume was thinking over the conditions, clearly unsatisfied but not enough so to simply turn and leave. It would be the interest, the curiosity, the confusion and the arrogance that brought him down - as it had every time Chase traveled somewhere to seek the finest warriors in the world.

"You would fight with no armor?" came the question.

"I see no point to it. You didn't hurt me last time, after all."

Another curse, and a sound - of a sword being drawn.

Chase turned fully and drew his own.

"To attack me is to accept the terms."

"Then I accept!"

Over the sea far beyond Acre, the storm broke, thunder and lightning lashing the waves. Even the glory of the setting sun couldn't break through the clouds; instead, it lit the reddening cliffs, steams of red and gold slowly fading as it sank beneath the edge of the world. Its beauty went unnoticed by the ships thrown by vicious waves and by men fighting like the storm itself, every clash of blades a thunderclap, every spray of blood a lightning strike. Sparks that lit burning ships flew from every scream of their swords.

A part of him wanted to fight with no weapons; a part of him demanded that he throw away his blade and charge Guillaume with nothing more than the hands and feet he knew how to use best. But the Knights Templar did not train their men the same way he had been trained. If he tossed aside his sword and attacked, Guillaume would likely lose not because he had been bested, but because he was surprised. So Chase held onto his sword and fought the way he had _also_ been trained, but not the way he preferred.

More than once Guillaume drew blood. In turn, Chase drew far more. He never aimed to kill, unlike the Templar against him, but rather to hurt, to injure, to _inconvenience_. He would let Guillaume bleed out slowly, each cut stealing both blood and power from him. Sooner or later he would fall, and then Chase would strike - reminding him of the deal they'd made and, if there was any argument, simply_ taking_ what was due. Before that, however, they had to reach that point, and when Guillaume's sword came within inches of his skull, Chase snarled in eager fury.

He dodged a high strike and swept out a leg as he crouched, a move unheard of in simple warfare. His leg caught Guillaume's own and nearly took the man to the ground, and as he fell Chase rose, his sword with him, blade up, sword out. It bit Guillaume across the face, from the jaw to up over the eye, and the Templar cursed wildly in bitter languages. He slapped a hand over his eye and pressed hard - but it was still there, unharmed, only shocked and numbed by the pain and the blood.

Chase would not blind his warriors. A man could battle sightless, yes, but animals could do no such thing.

There was a pause in the battle while Chase drew away and Guillaume pulled himself to his feet. Even half-blinded by blood and staggering with pain, he still stood up, still held his sword if in a much more slippery grip than before. The sand, darkening in the fading light, turned to black wherever the blood hit it; between them it was as if the night sky had fallen in raindrops.

"Had enough?" Chase asked derisively, smirking despite the stings on his own arms and sides. Guillaume gave him a look of such unparalleled hatred that it practically thrilled his mind to see it. _Yes,_ he thought as he readied a defense, _hate me. Hate with everything you have, and hate forever. Hate so that your soul turns as black as mine, as withered and derelict as any I have ever known!_

Words had even failed between them now; Guillaume only threw himself into the attack, fighting wildly but not without form. He abandoned all pretenses of defense and tried to give Chase no quarter, no room to fight back, but he was nowhere near as skilled and Chase found his opening, a hard and fast blow that should have killed the Templar - if he had used the blade. Instead, he turned the sword and rammed the iron pommel into Guillaume's side, feeling the crack of ribs under the armor and knowing, in that instant, that he had won. Another sharp blow upward knocked the sword from the Templar's hands, and a third - less vicious - brought him to his knees.

Chase struggled to keep his breath in check as he stood over the defeated, jaw clenched in a murderous grin. His wounds stung slightly as they sealed themselves, and his hands ached from the tightness with which he gripped the sword's hilt, but all the little discomforts faded in light of what he had gained with his victory. Guillaume, one eye bloodstained, clutching his injured side, knelt in shocked disbelief at what had just happened. There was no despair in him, only surprise and - of course the fury.

He couldn't speak, his lungs too battered and bruised, so Chase simply read the words blazing in his one good eye and laughed.

"I have won, Guillaume d'Amiens." He shoved his sword back into its sheathe, not particularly caring whether it was damaged or not. "And as we agreed, you are now _mine_ to command. You will serve me unto death and I will hear no objection unless you wish me to believe you dishonorable."

Guillaume stared at him, shrieking fury and bitter half-acceptance in his eyes. Dishonorable? Hardly something a man like him worried about. But defeated like this, so utterly and completely, what would he do? Where would he go? Back to his fellow Templar, who would either jeer him for his failure or demand to know what had happened? Sneak a different boat to home and try to survive alone and unknown? Now the despair began to crawl across his face, but he beat it back with a shake of his head.

He swallowed once, twice, hard, trying to regain his sensibility, then spat out a mouthful of blood. It hit the ground near Chase's feet and nearly splattered on the edge of his boots.

"Then take me to hell, demon." Resigned to his fate, Guillaume looked at his fallen sword. Chase approached him and set a gloved palm against his forehead. For a moment he was silent, thinking, musing, and as the sun's last rays vanished behind the sea, he closed his eyes.

Guillaume looked up a moment later when the hand tightened on his skull and saw a ripping, tearing figure, skin and cloth splitting and disappearing to give way to hideous scales. A tail lashed the sand; spines struck the air. Monstrous teeth gleamed in an animal's jaw.

Chase Young stood transformed, his claws digging hard into the defeated Templar's head so he couldn't get away, and fought back the urge to roar in animalistic fury.

The shock had paralyzed Guillaume, but it wouldn't last long, so Chase acted swiftly. An unfathomable darkness swept around his arm and engulfed the Templar, glowing for only a few seconds before fading entirely. It seemed simple, pointless, almost insignificant, but the best magics often are. He drew his hand away and stood back to watch.

"I deny Hell their claim, Templar," he growled. "Now, and for eternity."

It didn't take long. The shock wore off in the form of agony. Guillaume suddenly doubled over, gasping for breath, then cursing, then howling. His bones cracked and twisted to change into the proper shape, stretching or shortening as need be; his skin was pulled hard and grew paler, then nearly golden. He collapsed to the ground and Chase watched with a smirk as his jerking body was horribly malformed, ripping itself free of the clothes and armor and leaving behind a shape unseen except in the worst of dreams.

Then it began to smooth out. The golden skin was transformed to fur. Limbs stopped being horrifically mangled and settled into new joints. His face was no longer an awful mess but strong and noble, except for the eyes, where the color stood vivid and unsettlingly bright in the dying light.

Chase wrenched his own body back into its human form, feeling the animal urges die away as he reached out to press a hand to the handsome, tawny mane that was slightly matted with blood.

The lion slowly drew itself up, standing unsteadily, staring at him in the way of all cats unfamiliar with their surroundings.

Normally, he was more fond of tigers; vicious, cunning, and unrivaled in their strength, they had long since been his favorite choice for these endeavors. But the knights of Europe often took a lion for their symbol despite not having any alive anywhere on the continent. It was a strong, noble creature, revered and adored; the king of the plains and the jungle, it was one of their favored creatures. What irony, he'd thought, to make one of their fallen the very thing they so adore.

Besides, lions were impressive beasts. And he didn't have very many back at home.

Chase threw Guillaume's abandoned and ruined armor into the sea. Most likely, his brother Templar would find the blood and hunt for him at the cliff's base; they would assume he fought someone and was killed, pushed over the edge when they found his tabard clinging to a rock. He held onto the selfsame cloth for a little while to admire the work that had gone into it before letting it fly freely, a falling bird trailing bloody wings until it reached the waves below.

As they headed away from the cliff, Chase pondered what sort of armor he would give his lion for when he needed to fight as a human. There was no lack of Western goods in his armory, bought or stolen over the years, but they didn't particularly speak to him. They would need something.

A tabard, perhaps. In black, with the vicious red cross still strident on the front - transformed, of course, into that heraldic creature made legendary only with its death.


	3. China, Late 5th Century 2

The first few weeks of Chase's training went about as well as anybody could expect, but not quite as well as they'd all hoped.

To learn how to fight, they'd put him with the three other newcomers, both a little younger than he was. They started with the basic forms and movements and he picked up on those quick enough; they taught him how to hold weapons and were slightly relieved when he was quick to learn how to avoid slashing anyone open, even if the practice swords and spears were made entirely of wood. He learned to meditate, though that tended to be ruined by the fact that he was a seven year old boy being told to sit perfectly still and not think about anything. Still, he did all right, and at night Dashi and Guan would give him pointers about his forms - or tricks to pull on his teachers, in some cases.

But it wasn't the martial prowess that anyone was really concerned with. Children were quick to learn anything that let them run and jump and hit. Where people gave pause was in the afternoon lessons, when Master Bai took his young protégé into the classrooms and schooled him personally. The monks never said much about it, but things slipped, every now and again, and for boys whose ears were constantly listening for any possible hint of … _anything_, rumors were easy to find.

"I don't get it," Dashi announced one day, as he dropped down onto the steps next to Guan and watched the temple schoolroom that Chase and his teacher had disappeared into some time ago. "Why doesn't he just learn with the other initiates?"

"Maybe he doesn't know as much as they do."

"But they don't know anything! How can you know less than nothing?"

"Wouldn't _you_ know?" Guan asked in a dry tone, looking up innocently when Dashi turned to fix him with a glare.

"Jerk." The younger boy slouched further and watched the early autumn sunlight shine on the green-going-gold trees scattered through the courtyard. "You know what I meant."

"Sorry. I couldn't help it." Guan shifted slightly, unfolding his legs and letting his feet rest flat on a stair. "He probably knows other things than we do."

"Like what?"

"Farming. Things about animals." Guan thought back to when he had been even younger, picking out fragments from the few scattered memories he had of his very early life as the son of a village prefect. "Seasonal changes, maybe."

"I know all about that kind of stuff."

"No you don't. When was the last time they even let you _near_ the temple fields?"

"Last harvest! When we all had to go out there and help the villagers."

"That doesn't count. I meant when you weren't forced."

Dashi glanced out at the temple's high walls, mouth twisted in partial defeat.

" … the summer before that."

"And that was when they forbid you from ever going near them again."

"It wasn't my fault that fire started!"

Guan snorted, half in laughter and half in disbelief, making Dashi give him a dark look. They both knew that the fire had been _mostly_ Dashi's fault, even if it hadn't rained in weeks and the situation was just waiting for a spark. Someone had to _provide_ that spark, after all.

"Traitor. I thought we were friends."

"We are. But that's not my point. You don't know anything about farming. And probably less about animals."

"Horses go when you hit them," he said confidently, "and you get milk from cows and eggs from chickens."

There was silence.

" … that's it?"

"What else is there?"

"How do you take care of them?"

"With food."

"What _kind_ of food?"

"With … " Dashi faltered. "Grass, right? They eat grass? Wait, why are you asking me all this? This isn't a lesson! And you're not one of the monks, so I don't have to answer your questions."

"But I am older," Guan said with a smirk, even knowing that his age superiority was only by a year and a few months and that since they were in the same position, it didn't make much difference. "So you should respect me."

"Oh, come on!" Dashi gave a long-suffering groan and lay backward on the steps to stare at the sky. "I get it, I get it, he knows animals and I don't. That's not exactly a huge achievement."

"It is for villagers who make their living that way."

"You listen too much."

And they were silent again. With Master Yi out instructing other apprentices in their work, the two of them had nobody to tell them what to do - a situation they sought with regular desperation - and found themselves, as they occasionally did, ridiculously bored. Guan didn't mind it quite as much, but Dashi couldn't stand it - procrastination was all fine and good, but actual boredom was practically a sin for his ever-active mind.

Within five minutes he'd stood up and was staring at the latticed windows of the schoolrooms.

"What are you doing?" Guan asked warily, knowing the determined light that had suddenly sprung up in Dashi's eyes.

"I want to know what he's learning. Come on, let's go peek."

"We can't."

"Why not?" Dashi started down the steps, and Guan scrambled up to chase after him.

"If they haven't told us, we're not meant to know!"

"Even better." Rules tended to flex and become suggestions around Dashi. "Maybe they're teaching him something secret and forbidden!"

"They wouldn't do that. Master Yi told us, Master Bai has to catch him up to us. It's probably just history and other lessons, things you already know."

"Then what's the harm?"

With his friend moving unstoppably toward the schoolrooms, Guan had no choice but to follow Dashi and hope for the best, his frustration countered by his own curiosity of why they had to school Chase separately. Why _not_ put him with the other apprentices, the initiates freshly arrived from other cities and villages around the land? But unlike Dashi, Guan typically kept these thoughts to himself; answers either came in time, or stayed secret and hidden for a very good reason.

They reached the porch surrounding the building. Dashi crouched and motioned for Guan to do the same before sneaking up closer and listening at the edge of the latticework window. Guan stayed a few inches away, unwilling to listen but willing to hear Dashi pass on any information.

"Well?"

"I can't hear anything. They must be in a different room." Dashi poked half of his head up over the windowsill, ignoring Guan's frantic motions to _not do that_, and peered around. "Yeah, they're not in there. This one's empty. C'mon!"

They snuck around the nearest corner and past another door before pausing again, and when that revealed nothing, too, they made their way to a third corner classroom. Here Dashi paused and tilted his head to better hear anything that might be filtering through the finely-wrought wooden windows.

"Someone's in here."

"Quieter!"

"Someone's in here," he said in a whisper, ignoring Guan's glare. "I think it's them. I can hear Master Bai. He's saying … " Dashi focused, eyebrows furrowed. "I think he's counting."

"Counting?" Even Guan's deeply thoughtful mind couldn't come up with a good enough reason to explain this. "Counting what?"

"I don't know. He just went up to ten. I think Chase is … never mind, I can't hear him." Dashi frowned and tilted his head further to the side. "I wish they were closer."

"They aren't. Listen better."

"I'm trying!"

"Shhh!"

For a split second, there was a squabble, but they fell silent and still quickly enough when they heard movement from inside. When the door didn't fly open and send them running, though, they resumed their eavesdropping.

"He said … 'good job'. And now he's talking about brushstrokes … is it calligraphy? Are they teaching him calligraphy?"

"That can't be, not even _you_ know calligraphy yet."

"Lucky me, huh? I don't know what else it could be, then. He's definitely talking about brushstroke direction. It's gotta be something like that."

A thought occurred to Guan then, but it was so small he almost missed it. As it started to grow in his mind he was silent, making Dashi look at him in question.

"Well? What do you think?"

"I … what?"

"What else is it if it's not calligraphy?"

"I don't know."

"There's not many other options, though … "

"Well, what's he saying now?"

"Nothing. I can't hear anythi - wait, he just said goodbye."

Neither boy said a word.

Then, as one, they scrambled to try and run. Unfortunately for them, they were too close together and wound up getting tangled, Dashi's arm caught in Guan's elbow and both of them winding up falling face first (and in Dashi's case, half-on Guan) onto the polished floor, unable to extricate themselves in time to hide before the door opened and Chase stepped out.

He didn't notice them at first, rubbing something off the tips of his fingers, but it didn't take long for him to glance over and see the tangled mess of apprentices lying conspicuously close to the classroom window. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared at them.

"What are you two doing here?" he asked, sounding half-amazed and half-panicked.

"Waiting for you," said Dashi after a beat, his mind leaping into overdrive as he pulled himself off Guan. "Is that your last lesson for the day? We can go out and practice before supper if you want. What was that, anyway?"

"What was - what?" Chase shook his head and leaned away from Dashi's inability to realize people had private space. "No, it wasn't my last, it was … I have another … "

"Really? That's a lot of lessons." Dashi leaned back and ignored Guan's hiss of warning as the other boy climbed to his feet. "But I guess it happens some days. So what was it? Calligraphy?"

"No, it - I mean yes, I - were you listening?"

"No." Dashi smiled, then grimaced as Guan kicked him in the ankle. "Yes. A little. If it wasn't calligraphy, then what was it?"

"That's none of your business," Chase hissed in a similar tone to when Dashi asked about his eyes, but with less venom. Guan knew that it was probably best to back off, but this time, Master Yi wasn't around to reprimand the wayward apprentice, and Master Bai was still in the classroom. Only he was left to keep Dashi quiet, and another kick to the ankle wasn't going to do the trick.

"I'm just curious. C'mon, we're Dragons, aren't we? You can tell us. It was something to do with writing, but why would you have to learn that unless you were already - "

"It was writing!" snapped Chase, cutting off Dashi with a sharpness neither of them had heard from their friend before. "I can't read, okay?"

Dashi, stunned briefly into silence, blinked. Guan winced slightly at the admission, his theory suddenly confirmed.

"You can't _read?_ Really?"

Guan stopped resisting the urge to kick Dashi.

"Ow!"

"Yes! It's stupid and I know it so just leave me alone!" Chase turned away and made to storm back to the temple, but Guan caught up to him first.

"Chase, wait. It's not stupid."

"Yes it is!"

"Lots of people can't read." He stridently ignored Dashi coming after them, trying to defend himself against any forthcoming accusations. "It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Everybody at the temple can!" There was a frustration in his friend's voice that bordered on despairing. "And they all know it! They don't think I'm fit for this because of it!"

"I was just _asking_ - " Dashi started, but one look at Chase made his defenses trail off.

"Why wouldn't you be fit?" Guan asked as they all slowed to a halt along the path.

"I don't know. But I've heard them." Chase stared at the ground. "I know they think I'm stupid because I'm from a village. Because I was a farmer. They don't think I can _be _a proper monk." His voice wavered for a moment, but he collected himself with a shake of his head. "And they don't want me to stay here, and they think it's all a big mistake, and that Master Bai was wrong about m-me … "

For once, even Dashi didn't say anything immediately, though from the look he and Guan shared, he wanted to. Neither of them could find quite the right words. Then Chase looked up at them, his jaw clenched hard against any tears.

"I'm no good at it, either. I don't understand what they're trying to teach me, and they think I'm stupid. Right now I just … I wish I hadn't come here."

_It wasn't_ my _choice to bring back a child from the middle of nowhere and claim he's the next Dragon of the Wind._

Master Yi's words echoed in Guan's mind. Even though he was only 10, he was still the oldest of the three; he was also the quietest and listened the most carefully. Sometimes he heard things he knew he wasn't meant to hear. Often, they were the words that went unspoken.

He remembered little bits and pieces of what life had looked like for the villagers in his town, having gone with his father out to ensure everything was running smoothly. They'd seemed happy, in their way, but he'd never spoken to any of them. And then he'd come to the temple, closing out almost everything else in the world. Even when the monks went to help with the local village's harvests, he didn't talk to many of the people. They kept their distance and treated the young apprentices with a respect bordering on reverence, which unnerved him sometimes but wasn't much different from the way he remembered being treated back before.

And of course, he had known how to read and write practically before he could remember. It was standard. Dashi had been the same way. What would it be like to suddenly be pulled into a world like this, where knowledge was paramount, where words were stored for centuries on scrolls?

_It wasn't _my_ choice_ …

The other monks left Chase's education up to Master Bai because Master Bai was the only one willing to do it. They didn't want to deal with a peasant boy who'd only heard of libraries in stories.

"But you are here," Guan said finally, trying to keep his voice confident. "And you're learning. New things are never easy."

"Everyone else thinks they are."

"That's because they've already been taught. The older you are, the harder things are to learn."

"So I'm hopeless?"

It was an accusation out of nowhere, and Guan practically recoiled.

"No, I - "

"Don't be stupid," Dashi cut in, arms folded across his chest. "I already told you - if Master Bai thinks you're right for this, then you're right for this, no question about it."

"But everyone else - "

"Who cares what they think?" He shrugged with his entire body, practically knocking himself over in the process. "They're a bunch of old coots with no room in their heads for anything but mantras and history." Now he pointed at Chase, no sympathy anywhere on his face. "They think everybody's stupid because everybody doesn't know exactly what _they_ know. If you wanna up and believe them, then you _are_ stupid."

Chase stared. So did Guan.

"But!" Dashi's grin returned, a faint curve of his mouth that belied a thousand pranks just waiting to happen. "If you don't want to be stupid, then you can't believe them. You've gotta prove them wrong by learning everything they think you don't know. Then one day, you can shove it right in their faces and laugh at them when they fall over."

For a moment, the air was tense. Dashi's casual attitude toward this sort of thing - a lack of sympathy first and foremost - was a subject Guan was hesitant to breach. He'd seen Dashi fight with other boys over this sort of thing before. Deal with your own problems and make people realize they were wrong, was what he'd gleaned from the few times it had come up. It rarely worked.

Would it … ?

Then Chase's frozen expression changed. The frustration stayed, but the anger and unhappiness shifted into a sort of wary curiosity.

"So … they think _you're_ stupid, too?"

The air cleared.

"Of course. They think I'm the dumbest monk ever admitted to the temple."

"It's true," Guan added, smiling now as well. "You can ask anyone and they'll agree." Dashi shot him a dark look.

"You can't ask _me_."

"But you just admitted to it."

"Yeah, but it's not _true_ true! I'm not actually dumb!"

"I don't know … "

"Oh, come on!"

Dashi groaned in agonized irritation and slumped, sulking theatrically where he stood. Guan snickered under his breath, earning himself another glare, and Chase's shaky smile reappeared.

"Just because you do better than me in the classroom doesn't mean _anything_. We're training to be fighters, remember?" Dashi stormed past them toward the temple. He only got a few feet before Guan and Chase caught up to him with a double flying tackle to prove that even if they were training to be fighters, he still wasn't the best just yet.


End file.
